Dream Aureole
by The Secret Santa Project
Summary: FOR SHIROGANE777: Kaiba doesn't believe in dreams, in magic, or in philosophical musings about life. And he certainly doesn't believe in the boy and the dragon he loves.


This was written for **shirogane777**, as a part of the YGO Fanfiction Contest's Secret Santa project. Shiro, you're an awesome artist and writer and person, and we all love you dearly. :D

Pairings: Puppyshipping, Kaiba x BEWD, with slightly implied Toonshipping (Pegasus x Kaiba), Mirrorshipping (Noa x Kaiba), and Jou x Kaiba x BEWD. Please note that I refer to the BEWD as 'Kisara' for the sake of clarity, and that it's not actually Kisara I'm talking about (or it might be, depending on how you wish to interpret the fic xD).

Disclaimer: I don't own YGO.

Many, many thanks go to **the7joker7** for helping me with the computer details in this. Merry Christmas to everyone, and I hope you enjoy!

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_**Dream Aureole**_

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Kaiba Seto was not one for dreams.

But _this_—this ordered, linear, perfectly governed world before him—_this_ was almost too real for him to believe that it was nothing but a figment of his imagination.

The background was a softly glowing pale blue color, blurring gently into the distance so that he was unsure of how far it stretched. There was no distinct horizon, not even an outline for the 'ground' that he stood on or the 'sky' above him. He wondered, briefly, trivially, if the lack of dimensions meant that an abrupt switch in them would feel like nothing to his easily-fooled body. And in following with that thought, he imagined himself standing on the 'sky' so that the graceful, sweeping lines of code running in an unending stream before him were above his head.

With that thought, his dimensions flipped.

Only mildly surprised—the world of dreams was, after all, an odd place—Kaiba stepped forward, trench coat swirling briefly in the air created by the wake of his stride, and reached up with one hand. He brushed at the strands of numbers and symbols and watched as they continued on as if nothing had moved to block their way, flowing through his skin and illuminating it in blue.

All around him, similar rivers of code were following their own distinct paths, curving up and around each other with flawless right-angle turns and fading away as they progressed further from him. In glowing lines of blue and white, they crisscrossed through the air and built a cage of weightless bars, seeming to be trapping themselves as well as trapping him.

But as Kaiba wandered further toward where the glowing strips of code were concentrated, he noticed that they seemed to be heading toward a common destination—a cube, no more than ten feet per side, built completely out of strands of numbers. It gave off a faint light as he neared it, comfortable to his eyes and yet bright enough to warn him not to approach further.

_What a strange dream_, Kaiba thought absently, his thoughts drifting in the blue ether of his surroundings.

"_And such an odd world too."_

Kaiba whirled around, searching for the place where the voice had come from. It seemed to emanate from every direction of his surroundings, but he knew that couldn't be true—

"_No need to search, Kaiba Seto. I'm right here."_

"Where?"

There was a faint flicker of electricity to his left, sparks dancing across an invisible surface in the air. _"On your right, on your left. Above your head and beneath your feet. Distance and dimension has little value in this world, as I'm sure you've discovered—"_

Another slight shift in his vision, and Kaiba found himself inside the cube, then outside it, then trapped between it with lines of code running through his body. Then he returned to the position he had been in previously—and oddly, there was no vertigo or disorientation.

"_As of now, I am everywhere. And yet—where are you, Kaiba Seto?"_

"I'm dreaming this," Kaiba said firmly.

The voice gave a brief laugh, the sound light and ever-so-slightly mocking. _"Then what does your dream look like?"_

Kaiba was silent.

"_Go on. You have your virtual reality and your computer programming; surely you realize the similarities between this world and another?"_

"Cyberspace." Kaiba found himself mouthing the word, and yet the voice heard him.

"_Correct. And who am I?"_

"The motherboard?" Kaiba said sarcastically—the voice, though young, was easily recognizable as masculine.

"_Good guess. But no."_

"What can I call you, then?"

The air shimmered slightly, tiny pixels blurring into sight for a brief moment—green, then white, then deep, cerulean-blue—before it settled into sharp outlines and soft glow once more. The voice grew more serious, its edge disappearing. _"My name is Noa."_

* * *

The next night, Kaiba was back in the portion of cyberspace he had been in before, a mere foot away from the cage of encryptions. The numbers were still weaving grid-like patterns into it, painstakingly closing up all the gaps of space with digits of white. He found himself transfixed by their motions, as if they were an extremely interesting movie he was watching, and he did not notice the shift in the space under his feet until he happened to look down.

An intricate net of webbing had branched out from the point where he was standing, appearing to sink slightly beneath his weight, although he himself had not moved at all. The cube before him was also unaffected, resting lightly on the floor like it was insubstantial—which, Kaiba supposed, it technically was.

A stream of binary ran before his eyes, ones and zeros blurring into one long line. _"Back again, Kaiba Seto?"_

"Where is this place?" Kaiba asked in place of an answer, his gaze wandering above the cube and fixing on the distant contours of numbers tracing out three-dimensional shapes in the distance.

Noa seemed to shrug, although Kaiba could not see him; it was a gesture evident in the dismissive quality of his voice. _"In your mind, and suffusing every bit of the physical world. In the palm of your hand and yet stretching out over the earth. One-dimensional and two-dimensional. Need I go on?"_

"It's a contradiction," Kaiba said.

"_But of course."_ Kaiba imagined Noa waving a hand at the background. _"Cyberspace is, in itself, a contradiction. What is real and what is not? How much of it is tangible and how much of it is nothing but the figments of our imaginations and pretty pictures projected onto computer screens?"_

As he watched, the cage shimmered and grew translucent. Inside, there was nothing but another portion of virtual blue air, white symbols floating around before dissolving into tiny pixels. Slowly, the pixels swirled together and assembled shakily into two tiny shapes suspended in midair—a dragon and a boy. Like the inside of an etched paperweight, they rotated slowly so Kaiba could see them from all angles—digits swirling across their surfaces, meshing them against each other in a web of light.

They fit with each other, and yet they did not; there was something wrong about the codes that made up their bodies, something off about their poses, something awkward about the way they had been shoved so close. Like hearing a modal scale and knowing that it did not sound right, and yet knowing at the same time that it _should_ be right—

"_How real are they?"_

"They're images," Kaiba said as the boy flickered before his eyes.

"_Are images real?"_

Kaiba paused. "It depends on your definition of reality."

"_Don't avoid the question, Kaiba Seto. If I had caught you off guard, what would have been your immediate response to it?"_

"But you didn't catch me off guard," Kaiba maintained coolly. "Therefore, that line of reasoning is obsolete, and there is no point in pursuing it."

There was a long pause as the dragon faded away as well, and then Noa laughed softly. _"This is what will tear you apart. I challenge you: for one day, thinking with your heart instead of your mind, and see what comes of it. Abandon your logical reasoning and your business, and find out what happens. Perhaps that way, you'll be happier."_

"Abandon KaibaCorp?" Kaiba cast an amused look at the tiny streams of numbers running through the air, not sure where Noa was, or if Noa was actually in a fixed position. "Why would I ever do that?"

"_Ah, you'd be surprised at the strange things that people often do,"_ Noa said sagely, his tone mocking. _"And to one who is more computer than human, they are odd things indeed."_ He was silent for a moment, but then: _"What is this cyberspace creating within the cage?"_

"An image."

"_Of what?"_

"A boy and a dragon."

And though Kaiba could not see him and did not know what he looked like, he could have sworn that Noa was smiling. _"Jounouchi and Kisara."_

Even the names sounded wrong when said together.

* * *

"Why?" Kaiba asked the next night, staring fixedly at a group of rogue pixels that were clumped together messily before his eyes, forming the blurred outline of a boy barely over half his height.

"_Why what?"_

"Why am I here?" As he watched, the person's right arm disappeared before rapidly re-forming, complete with distinct fingers.

"_Because you want to be,"_ Noa suggested. The arm rose until its palm was facing Kaiba, flat against some invisible wall. The fingers curled in, then out, then in again, as if the owner of the hand was testing its mobility.

"Am I truly in cyberspace?" Kaiba said. A strip of code ran straight through the vague outline of a person in front of him, punching a widening gap in the middle of the figure's chest. It passed into Kaiba's arm as if it did not exist and skirted the top of the cage with a neat ninety-degree curve up, disappearing into the space above his head.

"_It depends on what you want to believe."_ The boy gave a final shiver and began to fill in with color block by block, some sections turning gray or an interesting array of rainbow lights before settling into white or tan.

Kaiba scowled. "Answer my questions directly, Noa."

"_And hypocrisy is a vice, Kaiba Seto."_ Code ran in a rectangle in front of Kaiba's eyes, replaying a scene of a teen with brown hair and a white trench coat standing in a field of pale blue. Sound emanated from the makeshift screen: _'Are images real?' 'It depends on your definition of reality.'_

"_We are much alike, are we not? A man with the mind of a computer, and a computer with the soul of a man. Such an unlikely pair for Jounouchi and Kisara to manifest themselves to, don't you agree?"_

"Manifest themselves," Kaiba repeated skeptically.

The colors solidified, forming the tentative image of a green-haired boy with white clothing and piercing blue eyes. It was completely two-dimensional, just the bare cutout of a person, and yet Kaiba could see from the smirk in the boy's expression and the glint in his eyes that he was Noa. _"You cannot possibly believe that they exist in your world as it is, naturally? A warning, then, before you proceed: They are not of the physical realm. They belong to the land of ether and computers, the land that, in the minds of many, only exists through the bytes of storage in a database."_ Although the boy's mouth had not moved while Noa's words came out of it, the wave of his hand toward the glowing box of code made it clear that he was Noa._ "They are not the same as you, Kaiba Seto. Far from it."_

"What are you trying to tell me?"

"_Ah, not accustomed to confusion, are you? You are Kaiba Seto, CEO of KaibaCorp, heir to a legacy of cruelty and war."_ His eyes unfocused, and he gazed intently at a point somewhere above Kaiba's shoulder. _"Adopted when you were twelve along with your brother Mokuba, and trained by Kaiba Gozaburo in the art of business before he died and left you in charge of his company. Tragic."_ The smirk was back now. _"You are planted well within the physical world, tied there by love and hate alike, so what purpose do you have in your dreams of this place?"_

"You're the one who keeps dragging me back," Kaiba said flatly.

"_No, I'm not. You drag yourself back."_

"At the moment, I'd like nothing more than a night of sleep without dreams."

"_Then try to visit during the day,"_ Noa suggested. _"The internet is a complex place, after all—surely you can find this location with ease."_

The next day, Kaiba sat in the bedroom of his mansion with the darkening sky at his back and the light of the lamp on his desk shuddering—no doubt the fault of either the wiring or the storm that was imminent on the horizon. The laptop's screen glowed white as it displayed the message: _"This file cannot be opened."_

There was a knock on his door, and Mokuba padded in, his eyes sleepy. "Why are you still awake, Seto?"

Kaiba cast an amused glance at his younger brother. "Why are you?"

"Because I saw that the light in your room was on," Mokuba said matter-of-factly, regarding the other with something close to sternness. "You should be in bed too. Is your laptop not working or something?"

"Exactly that," Kaiba said. "It might have picked up a virus from somewhere—although considering the level KaibaCorp's security, I'm not sure how that could've happened."

"It could be something that's already in the system," Mokuba suggested.

Kaiba shook his head. "Go to sleep, Mokuba. I'll handle it."

* * *

The soft glow of sunlight slanting through his window was mildly painful to Kaiba's eyes, tired as he was from the sleepless night before. He scowled into his coffee mug as his gaze traveled to the silver laptop lying innocently on the table, turned upside down with a panel on its bottom screwed out. The room blurred before him as he turned away from the kitchen counter, and he hoped absentmindedly that Mokuba did not walk in on him like this and force him to take the day off work.

"_How sweet, that you care for your brother so much."_

Kaiba frowned and glanced to the wall, searching for something he could blame—was he so tired that he was imagining that he was hearing Noa's voice?

"_I am nothing but a hallucination, Kaiba Seto. They are nothing but hallucinations, so let your mind forget them. It would be for the better."_

Clearly, he needed more coffee.

"_Denial is the first step to insanity—or have you not heard that before?"_

And sleep.

"_Don't say I didn't warn you."_

… and he _certainly_ needed the moment of shock that engulfed him when he looked up from the coffee maker to see a blond-haired teenager and a Blue-Eyes White Dragon in his living room.

"Oh, no."

"_Oh, yes."_

The boy, dressed in a blue uniform that Kaiba recognized as from Domino City's local high school, seemed almost as disoriented as he was. He crawled back on his hands and feet until he reached the sofa, huddling closer to the dragon's side, his eyes huge and wild.

"Who the hell are you?" Kaiba asked, now even more relieved that Mokuba wasn't there to see. There was that wrongness present again, the unshakable feeling that they had been shoved together by the impatient hand of some outside force, unwilling to realize that they did not belong with each other. And in that moment, Kaiba _knew_—

The boy's mouth moved, but no sound came out. The dragon swung its head to stare at Kaiba for a long moment before standing up slowly and extending one wing. He flinched, sure that it was going to slam into the side of the house and send the entire structure crumbling into the ground, but—

It passed through.

As if solid objects had never existed, the dragon rose up and disappeared into the ceiling, Kaiba and the dragon's companion gaping at it in awe. The boy mouthed something at it, though Kaiba could not hear what he said, and waved toward Kaiba.

_Jou-nou-chi._

His lips formed the syllables slowly as Kaiba watched, the boy's expression now hopeful.

_Ki-sa-ra._

"Jounouchi and Kisara?" Kaiba said quietly, the names heavy on his tongue, remembering Noa's voice saying them the night of his second dream.

The boy—_Jounouchi_, he supposed—nodded frantically, a grin spreading across his face. Yes. Then another sentence, spoken so rapidly that Kaiba didn't understand it.

"Why are you here?"

Jounouchi frowned, his expression confused, and waved a hand at the surrounding area before shrugging. He tilted his head up, saying something to the dragon that none but he could see, and did not seem to notice that his body had passed through the couch to his right when he moved.

"_Do you see now, Kaiba Seto?"_

"I'm dreaming," Kaiba murmured quietly so that the teenager wandering through his house would not notice him talking to himself. "This isn't real."

"_Don't be so arrogant as to assume what is real and what is not."_

"How is this even possible?"

Noa was silent for a long, long moment, and Kaiba turned his attention back to Jounouchi—who was presently jumping up and down, calling something inaudible in the general direction of the street—and thought that the green-haired boy had left him. After all, he was entrenched deeply enough in this dream for him to go along with it and simply hope to wake up as soon as he could.

"_There's a man named Pegasus J. Crawford,"_ Noa announced suddenly, making Kaiba jump.

"Pegasus J. Crawford, creator of the Duel Monsters card game?"

"Yes, Kaiba-sama," Isono said as he stepped into the room, holding out an envelope made of smooth off-white paper and startling Kaiba, who whirled around before calming down slightly and taking what his servant had offered. The address had been written down with black ink in flawless calligraphy. "He wants to meet with you."

And when Kaiba looked over his shoulder to wonder why Isono had not seen Jounouchi, he found that there were no signs that the blond teenager and blue-white dragon had ever been there.

* * *

"Kaiba-boy," Pegasus said with a smile, standing up from where he had been reclining on his beach chair next to the pool in his backyard. The rising sun cast an orange-yellow glow onto the water, reflecting too on the other man's silver hair. "I'm glad you could come."

"I have a question for you," Kaiba said by way of introduction—he had thought this out for a long time on the plane ride to the island amid Noa's snide commentary, and come to the decision that there could be no reason for Pegasus's invitation except the problem that Kaiba currently had. And even if he were completely wrong, from what he knew, the Industrial Illusions CEO and founder was quite accustomed to strange questions of any kind and would probably appreciate his randomness. "How much of the virtual reality and this reality are interconnected?"

"And what, may I ask, inspired this question?" Pegasus sat back down and waved to a servant, who brought out another chair with outrageously bright orange stripes running down its length.

Kaiba shrugged. "Curiosity."

Pegasus's smile widened, and he leaned back and took a sip of his red wine. "I doubt that somehow. But, nevertheless…"

"_Listen,"_ Noa whispered in Kaiba's ear, and he scowled into his glass.

"Well, much of this depends on your suspension of disbelief, Kaiba-boy," Pegasus began. "In summary, there are many realities that exist within this one, that are both separate and a part of it. The place known as _cyberspace_ and what we call the physical realm are only two of many. And as a general rule, they don't interact well with each other. I suppose you could say that, being so different, they are incapable of interacting and have no choice but to avoid each other—much like how lines on different planes cannot be considered parallel simply because they don't intersect."

He placed his glass down onto the table beside his chair. "Once, there was a Pharaoh in the time of the Old Kingdom, when magic still ran rampant through the cities of Egypt. The Pharaoh was a bridge between the physical realm of that time and the realm of magic, and as the devastating effects of dark magic spread to his land, he blocked the link between them so that nothing else would escape. And, as he was the only connection that spanned the two realms, he took his life.

"Many, many years later, a boy was born with a natural talent for games. So, in time, the boy became famous for his talents but unhappy because he was friendless and without a family. That was when he discovered the realm of death, and he became consistently more enraptured with it, until he decided that seeing his companions there was more important than playing games in the physical realm. In death, he was content.

"And there was a demon who was ruler of the realm of magic, who wished to extend his reign into the physical world. Unaware of the consequences of spanning both lands, he and the Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom faced off. As the demon faded away from the sapping of his life force that came with remaining too long in a foreign domain, the Pharaoh won, and the demon was forced to pour his life essence into the body of his most valued disciple in order to survive.

"The demon, the disciple, the Pharaoh, and the boy who played games met and fought. And with ease, they annihilated each other. But millenniums before that, when the continent of Atlantis still existed—and before even that, when there was nothing on the surface of the Earth and the Moon had splashed, molten, into its orbit—"

"Wait," Kaiba said, holding up a hand to stop Pegasus from continuing his speech, his eyes steely. "None of this can be true. You're only making it up now."

The other man swept back his fringe of silver hair to reveal the black patch covering the left side of his face and gave Kaiba an amused smile. "Indeed I am."

* * *

"_Wake up, Kaiba Seto."_ A foot nudged his side.

Kaiba's eyes flew open, and he realized that he was lying on his back and staring up at the soft blue sky of cyberspace, and that a green-haired boy was bending over him, not looking the least bit concerned. "What—?"

Noa's lips did not move, but Kaiba could still hear him speak. _"Get up, and Merry Christmas."_

Kaiba snorted, pushing himself into a standing position with his elbows so that he towered over his companion. "Noa, it's the middle of the summer."

Noa's expression indicated that he was vastly amused. _"Or is it?"_

The metallic blue form of a dragon appeared out of a spot in the sky, growing large and larger until Kaiba could see with razor-sharp clarity the scales on its belly and the shine of its claws. He thought he caught a glimpse of blond hair swept back by the wind and the blue leg of a uniform, but he wasn't sure—until the dragon landed with a light _whoosh_ on the ground beside him and Jounouchi hopped off with ease born of practice. The dragon's iridescent back and neck, airy and flawless and graceful, looked terribly out of place next to his brown eyes and golden hair—water and earth, not meant to mix, creating a hopeless puddle of mud when they did.

"Hey, Kaiba," the grinning teenager said, waving a hand at Kisara's back. "Want to come along?"

"How did you get here?" Kaiba demanded, ignoring how he had automatically taken a step closer at Jounouchi's offer.

He tilted his head, looking puzzled. "What do you mean? We've always been here."

"Not when I was last around," Kaiba maintained.

Jounouchi looped an arm around Kisara's neck, shrugging. Internally, Kaiba winced at the gesture and how the teen instantly withdrew his hand as if burned and glanced at the dragon apologetically. "Well, maybe not here," he allowed. "But we've been wandering this place for a while, trying to see what there was to explore, and then we found you."

"By crashing into my mansion," Kaiba said, raising an eyebrow at him.

Jounouchi frowned, and Kisara's blue, blue eyes seemed to convey a sense of confusion too. "I don't remember that."

"_Do you?"_ Noa's voice was lower than a whisper, and when Kaiba glanced over his shoulder to see where it had come from, there was nothing but the soft blue glow of cyberspace. Jounouchi and Kisara seemed to have noticed nothing.

"Never mind," Kaiba said.

There was a long, expectant pause, and somehow there was no awkwardness this time. "Come on," Jounouchi encouraged, climbing onto Kisara's back. "We'll show you where we live."

Kaiba followed him, and they rose into the sky.

As they flew, he watched the two others, Jounouchi's head bent toward Kisara's, his lips forming words that were unintelligible through the wind that blew past Kaiba's ears. There was still that wrongness in every move they made—Jounouchi enjoying the speed and the feeling of the air rushing past him, Kisara the calm of the upper skies. They did not fit with each other, and yet they were irrevocably forced together by bonds that they themselves had made.

"So, Kaiba," the blond-haired teen said, turning around expectantly. "What brings you here?"

"_Yes, what does?"_

"I don't know," Kaiba admitted bluntly. "What about you?"

Jounouchi grinned widely. "Same here. It's weird," he added, his voice thoughtful. "I don't remember much beyond the past few weeks. It's just been a giant blank, and I think there might be something important there… but whatever. Kisara and I are happy like this—"

The dragon swiveled its head around and blinked in agreement, eyeing Jounouchi and Kaiba speculatively as if searching for the same sense of unbalance that permeated her and Jounouchi's relationship.

"What's she saying?" Kaiba asked, transfixed by Kisara's gaze, unaware of why he had asked that question. _It's not like she's __**talking**__—_

"_She is."_

_How would you know?_ Kaiba was eventually reduced to imagining himself glaring at Noa, since Kisara was still observing him in silence.

Noa's smirk was evident in his tone—evidently, he and Kaiba had that much in common. _"Because I, unlike you, can hear her."_

Jounouchi gave him an odd look but nevertheless repeated, "She says she remembers you too. That we were knew each other, and that we split up here before. I wonder—" He broke off abruptly. "Why can't you understand her?"

"I don't know," Kaiba said again, although the words were reluctant to leave his lips and there was an uncomfortable heaviness in his chest that he remembered distantly as being caused by guilt. Noa's soft laugh echoed in his mind. _"You don't belong here, Kaiba Seto, any more than Jounouchi and Kisara belong in your world. Any more than they belong together—because I'm sure you've noticed that by now?"_

_Shut up._

The laugh was mocking now, the words acidic. _"__**You**__ shut up."_

* * *

"I wonder," Jounouchi said idly as he and Kaiba leaned against Kisara's stomach and the dragon's head was curled around to face them. The walls of the cave around them were protection against the bitter wind that whistled through the air outside, tearing down drifts of snow from the mountain they sat on. Jounouchi, previously shivering, had stopped by the time he had begun speaking, although Kaiba felt no cold. "Were we friends?"

Kisara gave an amused snort at the question as a new pile of flakes fell past the cave entrance with the hiss of rain, blocking their view of the outside world. The changing light it created cast flickering shadows over her body and Jounouchi's face, accentuating the smooth curvature of her scales and the sharp lines of his cheekbones. "Maybe."

They did not fit. Kaiba couldn't shake that insistent thought.

"_They don't. And they both know it."_

Jounouchi shrugged easily, seeming unbothered by the fact. "Well, let's be friends now."

With that, silence fell. He and Jounouchi and Kisara stared at each other for a long, long moment, as if memorizing each other's faces, as if they would never meet again. Then—

"Friends," Kaiba agreed softly, the word unfamiliar on his lips.

"_Friends,"_ Noa laughed. _"See where that gets you."_

"I like snow," Jounouchi mused as the blizzard outside howled its protest, the suddenness of it making Kaiba jump. "It covers everything and makes it look perfect, so that it has a chance to change." He snuck a glance at Kaiba from under golden lashes, his expression teasing. "Which I suppose means that _you_ don't like it."

"I like the clouds that bring snow," Kaiba said, remembering a winter night of rapidly cascading flakes and cold wind, of gray skies above showing oh-so-clearly the figure of a man dressed in a red suit plunging fast toward the ground as Kaiba stood and watched and felt his first taste of freedom.

"_How very morbid."_

"Kisara says that then we must all be happy," Jounouchi added, his eyes meeting the dragon's for a brief instant.

They understood each other; Kaiba could see that much. It was far deeper than the mere cyberspace-talk that he could not hear; it was an odd sort of half-formed bond between them, a bond born of necessity and strengthened out of necessity until it was no longer a forced thing. Though they might not have belonged with each other, they were already fused closely enough that it would not matter.

"_You have brought them together, Kaiba Seto, and you will tear them apart."_

_I won't._

"_Didn't I tell you that denial is a bad thing?"_

_I can't._

Since when had he grown to love them? When in the past few days had he developed a connection with a boy and a dragon he could only see in his dreams? How was that even possible?

"_I warned you. You didn't listen."_

"Is this real?" Kaiba murmured absently, unaware that he had spoken out loud.

"Is what real?" Jounouchi said, tilting his head to look up at him.

"This." Kaiba waved a hand at the world around them, at the slowing snowfall outside the cave, at the light that shattered off Kisara's scales in iridescent arcs. There was a sense of urgency overwhelming him, blocking out Noa's commentary, telling him that he had to know this or else—

"Why're you asking _me_?" Jounouchi said, laughing. "You're the one who's good with all this philosophical stuff."

"Tell me," Kaiba insisted, and he saw Kisara give him an inquiring glance.

The blond-haired teen let out a breath that formed a cloud of mist in the air, and Kaiba realized with a start that his own breathing was doing no such thing. "Well, I don't know. I _feel_ real to myself. Kisara feels real to me. Isn't that enough?"

Noa said nothing, but Kaiba knew his response; it was etched in his memories from all of the other boy's remarks for the past few days. _"No."_

* * *

The next night, Kaiba dreamed of the cave once more, with Jounouchi and Kisara standing in its entrance and smiling at him.

"Nice to see you again," Jounouchi called, his grin brilliant. Kisara seemed to emanate agreement, the glow of her scales soft and diffused this time. Around them, the sides of the mountain faded away into the blue nothingness of cyberspace, so that it might have stretched in all four directions for miles and miles, but he could perceive nothing beyond a few dozen feet.

"Come in," Jounouchi added encouragingly, waving toward the inside of the cave. There were no clouds anymore and no precipitation either, although the rock was covered with white snow.

There was a blur, the sound of humming filling Kaiba's ears as the world around him melded into one ongoing whirl of light and darkness and sound—like a DVD on fast-forward, winding quickly through all of its contents until the owner reached the part he wanted to watch—

Kaiba blinked and realized that he and Jounouchi were somehow standing within a few inches of each other, Kisara watching them with that unearthly, serious wisdom in her gaze. The other teen's arms were lying limp by his sides while Kaiba's hand was wound into strands of blond hair, perplexingly calm brown eyes staring straight at him. And their mouths were locked together as if frozen mid-kiss.

He was cool to the touch but not overly so, a bland balance between two extremes of temperature. He tasted like nothing, smelled like nothing, felt like nothing, and it was so terribly alien and _wrong_ and yet it should have been right—

He shoved Jounouchi away more out of shock than anything else as the other simply stepped back, looking more thoughtful than surprised.

Noa was smirking again. _"They don't have physical love in this world, Kaiba Seto. There is no instinct to fuel it, and only rarely someone to deserve it. But when love does happen, it is all in the mind."_

"That was interesting," Jounouchi said, gazing at him with blank apathy in his expression, and Kaiba felt the tiny shred of hope left inside him shiver, fade, and die a miserable death.

"Interesting," he echoed.

_Interesting_, Kisara whispered.

Kaiba's head snapped up, and he stared at the dragon as a shiver ran down his spine. _No, this can't be right…_ "Did you just—?"

"_What a strange development,"_ Noa said, his voice bored, and Kaiba suddenly wished that he could punch him.

_Tell me what's happening_, Kaiba demanded, and to his horror, bits of code floating through the air above his head: _.println("tell me what's happening");_

"You can hear her!" Jounouchi said brightly, and the streams of letters ran out of his mouth too: _.println("you can hear her");_

"_You're bleeding into this world," _Noa said, _"fading into it because you're too strongly connected through them. Look down, Kaiba Seto, and see what's happening."_

Kaiba held up his arm, and his hand was hollow on the inside, the skin made up of nothing but numbers and symbols—_Graphics g = ();(32,32,16,16)(source, 0, 0, null)_

Jounouchi grabbed it and wrote on it with his finger, his words imprinting themselves into Kaiba's hand. His grin was bright, Kisara's scales painfully iridescent to his eyes, and the world began to blur again.

Noa's words now, somehow managing to be heard despite the overwhelming sound suddenly rushing through Kaiba's mind: keys clicking, programs saving, data traveling through the endless realm of cyberspace. _"."_

* * *

Kaiba's head jerked up from where it had been lying on his desk. Beside him, a single lamp lit up his office, and a gap in the curtains behind his back revealed night dotted with the glow of street lights. Snow fell in soft drifts through the sky, the accumulation reflecting the yellow and orange beams of car headlights as they drove through the streets.

He opened his laptop, surprised to find that it was three o'clock in the morning of the twenty-first of December. And almost on whim, he glanced to the back of his right hand and saw one sentence there, written in black pen—_C:\Users\KaibaSeto\Documents\empty_

Noa's words again, laughing in his ear: _"Go on, open it."_

_The file cannot be found._

"I don't understand," Kaiba said, staring at the screen.

"_Think. Every program needs a place for storage, Kaiba Seto. What broke you hard drive? Why couldn't you access the one document that was eventually forced to use a portion of the disk that it could not read? What was being created there?"_

Kaiba yanked open the bay on the side of his laptop, taking out the data disk implanted there. "This is storing the cyberspace where Jounouchi and Kisara are," he said. "They're just a _program_—"

Noa snorted. _"I thought I'd made that much clear."_ He paused, seeming to be choosing his words carefully before he began again. _"That little disk holds not just them, but that entire portion of cyberspace. It holds the cage that is taking on your likeness inside it and making what you are in this world into a transcription in that world. Now you can destroy it with just one movement of the hand—"_

"I thought the cage held Jounouchi and Kisara," Kaiba said, glaring at the display before him. "How could it possibly be making a transcription of me?"

"_And how did Jounouchi and Kisara escape it? The price must be paid, and you took their places inside it. In a few hours, you will be gone. Dead, at least to this world. DO YOU WANT THAT?"_

Kaiba jerked back in his seat, shocked by the sudden venom in Noa's voice. Sparks danced along the edge of his monitor before flickering away, and the image of a green-haired boy appeared on the screen. "Why do you even care what I do, Noa?" he retorted. "It's not as if it affects you in any way. It's not like through this, I'm disrupting some balance between these two realms—"

"_Do you __**never**__ listen to anyone but yourself?"_ Noa's expression was livid_. "Didn't you hear what Pegasus said? Those who tamper with a bridge between any two worlds will cause __**both**__ to suffer. Do you think I want this? Do you think I'm encouraging you to go along with your idiotic plan?"_

"Noa, since when have I cared for anything you said?"

The other boy paused, folding his arms on the screen. _"Do one little thing for me, Kaiba Seto."_

"Tell me what it is first."

"_Answer this: who in this world do you love?"_

"Mokuba," Kaiba said automatically.

"_And is he worth leaving? Is it a fair exchange to cause the suffering of your little brother so you can run off with a dragon and a teenage boy who were turned into computer programs simply because they believed they could save you there? Do you have no compassion left?"_

"What did you say Jounouchi and Kisara did?" Kaiba said sharply, sitting up straighter.

"_They thought you were dead, and they died to search for your soul in cyberspace. And now your soul is tied to this world, while theirs are tied to another; what will you do now? Will you abandon your brother and your life simply to see them once more?"_ Noa stopped short, and his image faded away. When he next spoke, it was quietly, seriously, although still with an undercurrent of anger. _"You are human, Kaiba Seto. I am not. And life in this virtual world is painful beyond your limited imagination—what would you do if you were conscious for every single second that had ever existed, knowing that no matter what you did, you would still live on? Why do you think Jounouchi and Kisara and I slept for so many years? We forced ourselves into that sleep so we would not have to exist through all that time._

"_Stay out of here. You are human, I am machine, and our worlds were not meant to meet. I was born for this life of nothingness, and you were not. Without you, Jounouchi and Kisara will simply sleep on. Do you want to die, or do you want to live?"_

"I—" Kaiba paused, unsure, whatever word he was attempting to speak stuck in his throat. _Mokuba or them?_

"_You are real, and they are not."_

"No," Kaiba whispered, clenching the disk in his hand. "They're real too, as firmly planted in reality as I am, as Mokuba is. They still have souls and personalities and freedom, and that makes them living. And no matter what you say, I can't destroy them." He remembered a laugh and an easy shrug, the offhand response to what the speaker viewed as an offhand question—_Well, I don't know. I feel real to myself. Kisara feels real to me. Isn't that enough?_

"_What do you mean?"_

In response, Kaiba slammed the disk back into the side of his laptop and closed the bay. A window popped up on the screen: _Windows has found new hardware._

"_You can't actually be considering this."_

"I am," Kaiba said, waiting for the next message.

_Scanning for viruses._

"_What if I told you that you're insane and hallucinating this all, and that going through with your idea is your way of fully embracing your insanity?"_

Kaiba paused for a moment but gave himself no time to consider Noa's proposition. If he thought too much—if he thought at all—he knew he would reconsider. There would be no correct solution, but he could at least make it as right as possible. "I would still do it."

_Download all?_

His cursor hovered over the button for a fraction of a second more, and he took a deep breath before clicking.

_Yes._

* * *

_**- **__**many weeks later**__** -**_

_Download complete._

"Do you think he's okay?" Jounouchi asked anxiously, attempting to peer past the cage of code before him. A few of the numbers rose up and shoved him back, making him wince.

"Yes," Kisara said.

Jounouchi blinked at her and then laughed at how he was still surprised by the certainty of her response despite their long history together. "Alright then." He paused for a moment as the symbols on the side of the cube began to flutter away, peeling away layer after layer of its surface. "Do you think he remembers anything about his past, since we do now?"

"He might," Kisara said. "After all, if his memories were encrypted into cyberspace, and this download is in full…"

She was cut off by the cage dissipating completely in a flurry of glowing letters and symbols, the debris clearing to reveal the form of a man with brown hair and a white trench coat lying flat on the ground.

"And the dead man awakens," Noa murmured, his expression impassive.

"Hey!" Jounouchi said eagerly, running to his side. "How're you doing?"

Kaiba blinked and focused instead on Noa, standing a few feet from Kisara and staring straight back at him. "I need to do something first," he said, pushing himself up.

Noa rolled his eyes and turned away. "Indeed you do, stupid one."

* * *

Mokuba woke to a message displayed on the screen of what was once his elder brother's laptop, code running across the top and bottom:

_.println("Hello, Mokuba. This is Seto.")_

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_**- **__**end**__** -**_

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Shiro, your writer was **safa'at keruth**! *sparkles and confetti* And if people familiar with my style couldn't guess from the occasional long sentences and the pretentious title, I don't know what else to say. xD

Endnote: An aureole is the outermost atmosphere of the sun, visible as a halo during an eclipse. Dream aureole is a reference to logic going around and around in circles (try googling 'Hutton's Paradox') as well as a dream of something too unrealistic to reach. How's that for pretentious? xD

I hope you liked my attempt at a happy ending—and whether you did or not, there's always the possibility of a sequel describing exactly what happened with Kaiba, Jounouchi, and Kisara in the past. I would have explored that concept a lot more if I'd had the time... so yes. Potential sequel. ^^

Merry Christmas once again to everyone!

And please **review**! Every writer loves reviews and concrit – they're the best Christmas presents you could give :3 ~


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